What does the Bible say about the pre-existence of souls?

This looks like immortality of the soul.

The immortality of the soul is not affirmed in Scripture, in just those words, but the truth of it is clearly taught in Scripture, making our belief in it as certain as if it had been.

37 I will add only a word on your reasonings about the conscious and unconscious state. Forgive me if I say these words are a blind. There can be neither a conscious nor unconscious state of what does not exist. There is, on your theory, no being in existence. If God creates a new one, it is not that which was before, it is a new creation, as much as when a man is born. You compare it with this; you forget that when a man is born, it is a new being. He did not exist before; he is referred to no previous existence. But if God brings a new man into existence out of nothing, how is this new man to answer for what another man did who lived four thousand years before? Surely it must be the same man to be responsible. But it is not, if he has totally ceased to exist. Hence even the fantastic notion of the pre-existence of the soul supposed its existence to continue. Consciousness or not, is not the question. You deny its existence. What does not exist, cannot be even unconscious.

330 There was another system, which Origen applied even to Christ, that the higher soul could not come into this world without taking a secondary soul, and so, consequently, the body. Indeed, according to him, they are born here according to their conduct in a previous existence. Josephus says the Pharisees held the metempsychosis, or transmigration of souls. It would seem that this trinity of the soul was someway connected with their speculations about the Godhead, the Memra, Shekinah, and a tissue of irreverent absurdities, which I need not enter into here.

Plato teaches the pre-existence of the soul (Phaedo, 923) and transmigration. Only true saints, who had kept alone from every snare of corporate existence, went, it is suggested, to God: so did Pythagoras. Philo, the Jew, held the pre-existence of the soul, as Plato, and that the air is full of demons up to the moon; and the lower, or inferior class, were disposed to be earthly, and came into bodies. This came from Indian or Egyptian heathenism. Why do I speak of these things? Because the great early doctors of the church, Justin Martyr, Clement of Alexandria, were educated in Platonism. Origen, too, embraced the whole system — transmigration, and the renewal of the whole series of the soul's history in another earth. Jerome and Ruffinus (Latins), and even, in part, Ambrose followed Origen in a great deal, as did Gregory of Nyssa, and many others in the East.

238 We have a singular specimen of Jewish, Eastern or Platonic soul's pre-existence notion, in the Book of the Wisdom of the Son of Sirach, chap. 41:9-10, though the unspotted body is out of the way. It is very likely that the disciples, in John 9, were under the popular, unreasoning influence of this, when they asked, 'Who did sin, this man or his parents?' The Lord's words would merely be negative.

276 Socrates, and Plato, held that men's souls had existed before, and were treated in the world according to some previous responsibility, only when he came to himself, he held his philosophy, intellect, gave him a title to be freed from it; all the mass might go to purgatory, or to hell and the furies - that was no affair of his. He says: 'Socrates would have annihilated poetry in order to develope man' - Yes! and love to others too; he would have justice and mathematics, and so a title to have only his divine soul left to be with the gods.

H. Your remark is quite in place; but it leads to the confirmation and clearing up of the real truth on this question — "What is revelation?" From his education and habits as a Jew he distinctly recognized the inspiration of the Old Testament — particularly of Moses' writings, but of all; and inspiration in the fullest sense, the operation of the Holy or prophetic Spirit; so that man was wholly shut out. He was far more a believer in his theory on this subject — very far — than Bunsen or the rationalists, even the most moderate of them. But two things are to be observed: first, he philosophized independently of the scriptures, though he sought to bring them in as confirmatory, and allegorized them even where he owned them to be historical. Abraham meant one idea, Israel another, Jacob another. He often admitted only ideas — no literal history at all. He was the most outrageous spiritualizer, but reducing all to man as he is looked at as virtuous. Hence evident inconsistencies. But, what is more material, there was no divine object in revelation for him. God remained necessarily unknown in Himself. The revelation he had was of ideas. The λόγος — the universal idea of all — the universe; the bringing this idea into finite man's mind, a little world of answering ideas, formed a microcosm as the philosophers called it. Man was, when virtuous, when partaker of θειῶν ἀρετῶν (divine virtues), an ἀστεῖος ἀνὴρ (Bunsen's "eminent" men), a possessor, as we have seen, of the ὀρθὸς λόγος, which, in its infinitude, was a kind of middle being between God and creatures (the evident origin of Arianism, and the early philosophical Christianity of Alexandria). The law for him was the expression of this perfect or right reason, and was to be perpetual and universal. But there were thus only great principles and ideas to be made good — there was no divine object at all. God was inaccessible. The λόγος comes out as a universal archetypal idea, realized finitely in creation, but not as a personal object of faith, though sometimes treated almost as a person, because acting in power; and this λόγος was man's intelligence. Messiah is only referred to as a conqueror to come, subduing the Gentiles, and making good Jewish hopes; beasts to be tamed — men too; sickness to depart; the Jews to be a kind of world priests. There is no proper revealed divine object of faith. The soul is an ἀπόσπασμα, a shred, an ἀπαύγασμα, a shining forth, a ray, an ἐχμαγεῖον ἐμφερὲς corresponding impress of God. It existed before, came into a body, and so was lowered and dualized (and this circumscription of our spirits in the limits of flesh and time, practical selfishness, Bunsen reckons the fall); and when it dies, goes back to heaven, restored to unity. There is a reproduction of the word in the soul, but no revealed object before it. This part of man is reason and conscience.

He distinguishes clearly God's immortality and ours. The Gnostic heretics argued that man must not be born if he was immortal, or, if there was a beginning of generation, the soul must die with the body. Now as he says, God alone is without beginning, but all things whatever have been and are made of Him, receive indeed their beginning of generation and in this are inferior to Him who made them, since they are not unborn, but they continue and extend unto the length of ages according to the will of Him who made them (ii. 34). Again God giving them life and perpetual continuance … and souls which before at the first did not exist — hence continue since God has willed they should be and subsist. The only Father who speaks of the gospel uses language perfectly clear to me; but as one might cavil about the Greek word, I do not quote it.

Such was the school Dr. N. delighted in — their philosophy, he tells us, not their theology; but it is impossible to separate them. The fall of man being a pure soul coming into a material body — is that philosophy or theology? Even as to Christ (Origen de Principiis, book 2, e, 6; De Incarnatione, 1, 90, ed. De la Rue), holding, as he does expressly, that the divine nature cannot, without a mediator, be united to a body, and each soul receiving according to its deserts, he states that the Word or Son took one of these previously existing souls from the beginning of creation, and became and remained thoroughly one spirit with him; and then, by the mediation of that, took a body too, though he admits it is beyond even the apostle's thoughts. I need not go farther. Men's souls were to work their way back to liberation from matter, as also Philo and their Platonic predecessors and Gnostic contemporaries held: that was the object of the mission of Christ.